GC 2009: Guild Wars 2 - First Details and Q&A

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We went straight to the developers at ArenaNet to learn more about the brand new online RPG sequel.

By IGN PC Team

Ever since Guild Wars: Eye of the North shipped almost two years ago we've eagerly waited for news on Guild Wars 2, the next big step in ArenaNet's popular franchise. While Guild Wars 2's existence was no secret, the company kept a tight lid on the game, and ArenaNet all but disappeared from sight last year. However, at Gamescom in Cologne today, the wraps came off of Guild Wars 2 for the very first time. This promises to be a bigger, more epic game than its predecessor, and we've got some of the very first details, as we were able to ask ArenaNet about the sequel. Answering our questions is Mike O'Brien, ArenaNet studio head and co-founder; Eric Flannum, lead designer; and Ree Soesbee, world designer and writer.

First, some details. Guild Wars 2 is set about 250 years after the events of the original games, and this is a world in upheaval and conflict. While there have always been dragons in the world, the Elder Dragons have emerged, and they're much more powerful than the first type of dragon. To battle these Elder Dragons will require new heroes. The Elder Dragon of Orr raised an entire landmass from the ocean. You and others will have to challenge these Elder Dragons and learn more secrets about the world.

IGN: Well, here we are at Guild Wars 2. This is a game that's been in development a while, but could you give us an overview of what's new? What makes this worthy of the "2" after the title?

Mike O'Brien: The original Guild Wars was ArenaNet's first game and was an enormous breakout success for us, with more than six million sales and more than a billion hours played. Its unique gameplay mechanics offered players a fresh take on online role-playing games, and its no-monthly-fee business model set it apart from all its competitors. We think of the Guild Wars franchise as the un-MMO, with all of the depth and social features you'd expect from an MMO but without the grind or the mandatory time commitments, and without the monthly fees.

After releasing Guild Wars, we continued to grow it through two additional campaigns and an expansion, adding an array of new character professions, new skills, new continents to explore, and new gameplay mechanics. Eventually we reached a ceiling of how much we thought we should add to the game without undertaking a radical revamp. So two years ago we announced our intention to stop developing additional campaigns and instead turn our company's attention to developing a sequel. Developing a sequel allows us to start again with a clean slate and build a new Guild Wars from the ground up to be the game we always knew it could be.

Guild Wars 2 takes the instanced gameplay that allowed us to tell stories so effectively in the original and supplements it with a fully persistent world that provides easy opportunities to find existing friends and make new ones. It takes the flexible and customizable character progression from the original and adds new options, new playable races, and new personalized storylines. It takes the optional competitive aspect of the original and splits it in two, so that it's both more approachable for casual players and more of an e-sport for the hard core. It takes the unique skill deck system of the original and makes it more comprehensible, with a focus on quality of skills instead of quantity.

Have fun storming this castle!

During the past two years of development we made huge advances to our game engine, adding a persistent world with free-form movement and exploration, day/night cycles, cutting edge support for dungeons and interior environments, numerous graphical advancements including support for more detailed environments and models, better lighting and shadows, new animation and effects systems, plus new audio and cinematics engines, a more flexible combat and skill-casting system, and so on. We also built an array of new content creation tools, enabling us to build a larger and grander world, bring it to life with a wide variety of events always taking place, create more unique and interesting adversaries, and tell stories more compellingly than we ever did before.

And to take advantage of all that technology, we have the best artists and designers in the industry, creating a rich, epic world for you to explore. One of the themes of Guild Wars 2 is hand-crafted beauty, and we try to permeate this through everything we do. All of the art in the preview video was created in-house by our team and all the game footage was captured real-time from the Guild Wars 2 game client, no trickery involved. And because we create beauty through the expressiveness of our art, not simply by pushing more polygons than our competitors, Guild Wars 2 runs great on mainstream PCs, just like the original Guild Wars does.

Guild Wars 2 is an approachable, action-oriented online role-playing game with all the depth of an MMO. It's easy to get into, and lets you play when you want and how you want, without making huge demands on your time. It has an enormous, living world to explore, and a rich story that's very personal to your character and reflects the choices you make. Our goal with Guild Wars 2 is to create nothing less than the definitive online role-playing game of all time.